I have a feeling this topic has been discussed to death, but here goes anyway:
Has anyone had luck with using a NetApp for a mail spool?
We did some tests, and although the locking worked fine most of the time, we did find that it dropped some messages for no reason whatsoever.
In our case, the client machines are SPARCs running Solaris 2.5.1
Is there a problem with the locking on the NetApp, or are the Solaris libraries lying about the locks being in place and the writes taking place properly?
On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, Gregory Gulik wrote:
I have a feeling this topic has been discussed to death, but here goes anyway:
Has anyone had luck with using a NetApp for a mail spool?
yes. the poor old F330 was driven into the ground, and we had to get some extra NVRAM in in a hurry, but i guess we've got prolix users. i have had no trouble whatsoever, apart from the pain of paying for the NVRAM.
In our case, the client machines are SPARCs running Solaris 2.5.1
many of our readers are POP, rather than NFS; i would guess that no more than 50 machines actually NFS mount /var/spool/mail for any serious mail reading. our sole writer is Solaris 2.5, patched to the hilt.
Tom Yates - Unix Chap - The Mathworks, Inc. - +1 (508) 647 7561 MAG#65061 DoD#0135 AMA#461546 1024/CFDFDE39 0C E7 46 60 BB 96 87 05 04 BD FB F8 BB 20 C1 8C
In our case, the client machines are SPARCs running Solaris 2.5.1
many of our readers are POP, rather than NFS; i would guess that no more than 50 machines actually NFS mount /var/spool/mail for any serious mail reading. our sole writer is Solaris 2.5, patched to the hilt.
Well I dunno. I deliever email to ~/.mailbox to ~200 users and automount everyone's directory from my 540 to an Ultra1. Been workin' like a champ for about nine months now. This Ultra also acts as a popper, users automount their home dirs too and use a wide variety of email readers.
I do, however, use procmail for local email delivery and use ".mailbox.lock" for locking. I haven't had an problems with this method except for Sun's mailtool which seems to sometimes randomly leave a ".mailbox.lock" . Solution seems to tell people "don't do that" *smirk* and instead use dtmail.
- mz
-- matthew zeier -- mrz@3com.com -- 3Com EWD Engineering -- 408/764-8420 ...................................................................... "Y el mundo se mueve, mas rapido y mejor." - Fey
I can fairly safely say that they work pretty darn well for mail spools. We use Netapps for most of our mail services, both for our national ISP service and some of our higher end systems, and other than some known issues with NFS3/TCP, we haven't had any specific locking-related problems.
And we're running many hundreds of thousands of mailboxes through this. Note, though, that we've rewritten all our delivery agents and POP3 software to do stronger locking than the standard distribution of sendmail or of various pop3 daemons. You'll definitely want to make sure that what you're using is robust enough to lock properly (for example, I've seen things that fopen, lock the fileno() of the stream, write to the stream, unlock the fd, and fclose...which can fail because the stream isn't flushed to the fd until the fclose).
--David Schairer Director, Core Technology Concentric Network Corp.
In our case, the client machines are SPARCs running Solaris 2.5.1
many of our readers are POP, rather than NFS; i would guess that no more than 50 machines actually NFS mount /var/spool/mail for any serious mail reading. our sole writer is Solaris 2.5, patched to the hilt.
Well I dunno. I deliever email to ~/.mailbox to ~200 users and automount everyone's directory from my 540 to an Ultra1. Been workin' like a champ for about nine months now. This Ultra also acts as a popper, users automount their home dirs too and use a wide variety of email readers.
I do, however, use procmail for local email delivery and use ".mailbox.lock" for locking. I haven't had an problems with this method except for Sun's mailtool which seems to sometimes randomly leave a ".mailbox.lock" . Solution seems to tell people "don't do that" *smirk* and instead use dtmail.
- mz
-- matthew zeier -- mrz@3com.com -- 3Com EWD Engineering -- 408/764-8420 ....................................................................... "Y el mundo se mueve, mas rapido y mejor." - Fey
On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, Gregory Gulik wrote:
Has anyone had luck with using a NetApp for a mail spool?
We're using Ultra+SSA combos as NFS mail spools right now, but we are moving as fast as we can to Netapps. NETCOM U.S. has a couple dozen F330's handling their dialup and shell mail spools for several hundred thousand users. They've written sendmail and popper to get around some of the locking issues too (like delivering to MH-style mail directories rather than appending messages to a mailbox file).
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Brian Tao -
David Schairer -
Gregory Gulik -
matthew zeier -
Tom Yates